FLUENT NEWSREADING ON A CELL PHONE
The ability to check news at any time is one of the joys of the mobile phone, but trying to read tiny type and busy layouts on a 2-inch screen isn’t.
A new free iPhone app called Fluent News addresses that problem (a mobile Web version is available to any phone with a browser at fluentnews.com). It aggregates news, collecting only stories that are formatted for the mobile phone, then recasts them into its easy-to-use news browser.
No account is required; you just fire Fluent up, and the screen shows a list of headlines and a summary. Tap the headline to read the full story. Fluent cuts clutter by showing only one story on any particular topic. For other accounts, press the “related stories” button. If you want to delve more into a particular category of news, there are 12 sections, including Business, Tech and Entertainment.
It may not replace your favorite single news app, or even your highly programmable news feeds, but for a fast and easy overview of the day’s headlines, Fluent is just the thing.
A STUDY’S SIDELONG VIEW OF LCDs FINDS THEM LACKING
According to a new study by DisplayMate Technologies and supported by Insight Media, LCD televisions continue to come up short when compared with their competitors.
DisplayMate tested LCD sets from Samsung, Sharp and Sony, and a plasma display from Panasonic. The company’s aim was not to single out specific models but to look for issues common across the technologies.
Most striking was the inability of LCD TVs to maintain picture quality when the sets were viewed from an angle. The tests showed that LCD picture quality deteriorated as soon as someone sat just 10 degrees off center.
“The significance of this is enormous, because it means that the ‘sweet spot’ for seeing an accurate picture on an LCD HDTV is only one person wide, even for these top-of-the-line models,” said DisplayMate’s founder and chief executive, Raymond Soneira.
DisplayMate also had some harsh words for some of the specifications promoted by TV manufacturers. Speaking of quoted contrast and brightness levels, the report said that “the values published by most manufacturers are now so outrageous that they are close to absolute nonsense.”
A SMALLER PSP WITH A BIGGER JOB
If you want to quickly understand Sony’s PSP Go (US$250, coming Oct. 1), just think of the rule of two. Compared with the regular PSP, it is 50 percent smaller, but it costs twice as much as Nintendo’s DS, which is outselling it by 100 percent.
At the center of Sony’s PSP thinking is Media Go, Sony’s iTunes-like content manager. You can drag and drop movies, songs and videos onto the Go’s 16GB of memory, and archive your big files on your Windows computer’s hard drive.
Gone is the tiny Universal Media Disk, the optical disk format that
Sony developed for use in the
PlayStation Portable. Sony says it will try to make older UMD titles available as downloads, and starting Oct. 1, most UMD titles will have a downloadable equivalent.
Reading between the lines, the UMD was a battery-burning dud that Sony had to dump.
Can the PSP Go stand up to the cheaper Nintendo DSi, Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch and a growing swarm of smartphones? Stay tuned. Safe to say, this is a little gadget with a big job.
MICROSOFT READIES ONLINE OFFICE
Microsoft this week unveiled new details of its Office 2010 productivity tools, which will feature a free online program to counter similar programs already available from Google and other competitors.
The online features of Office Web, as the new service will be called, will allow workers to access an online word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software and a note-taking program, and store their documents on Microsoft’s servers.
Because the documents will be stored online, they will be much easier for people to share and collaborate on, Microsoft said.
Microsoft said the ad-supported Web suite will be available to more than 400 million Windows Live consumers at no cost.
“Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online,” Microsoft said on its Office 2010 Technical Preview site.
“View documents across PCs, mobile phones and the web without compromising document fidelity. Create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface.”
Sales of Office software are a mainstay of Microsoft, the world’s largest software company. The Office division has earned profits of over US$9 billion in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2009, on sales of US$14.3 billion.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
On a hillside overlooking Taichung are the remains of a village that never was. Half-formed houses abandoned by investors are slowly succumbing to the elements. Empty, save for the occasional explorer. Taiwan is full of these places. Factories, malls, hospitals, amusement parks, breweries, housing — all facing an unplanned but inevitable obsolescence. Urbex, short for urban exploration, is the practice of exploring and often photographing abandoned and derelict buildings. Many urban explorers choose not to disclose the locations of the sites, as a way of preserving the structures and preventing vandalism or looting. For artist and professor at NTNU and Taipei
March 10 to March 16 Although it failed to become popular, March of the Black Cats (烏貓進行曲) was the first Taiwanese record to have “pop song” printed on the label. Released in March 1929 under Eagle Records, a subsidiary of the Japanese-owned Columbia Records, the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) lyrics followed the traditional seven characters per verse of Taiwanese opera, but the instrumentation was Western, performed by Eagle’s in-house orchestra. The singer was entertainer Chiu-chan (秋蟾). In fact, a cover of a Xiamen folk song by Chiu-chan released around the same time, Plum Widow Missing Her Husband (雪梅思君), enjoyed more
Last week Elbridge Colby, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy, a key advisory position, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Taiwan defense spending should be 10 percent of GDP “at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense.” He added: “So we need to properly incentivize them.” Much commentary focused on the 10 percent figure, and rightly so. Colby is not wrong in one respect — Taiwan does need to spend more. But the steady escalation in the proportion of GDP from 3 percent to 5 percent to 10 percent that advocates
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